Our Favorite Steam Mop

After dinner our kitchen floor tells the whole story of the meal — smeared sauce under the highchair, a sticky ring where a cup landed, whatever the baby decided to fling. With crawlers and barefoot little ones down there all day, mopping a film of chemical cleaner around and calling it clean never sat right with us. We wanted the floor actually sanitized, not just perfumed.

The mop that fit our house is the Bissell PowerFresh steam mop. It cleans with just steam — no chemicals around the kids — and as Mom says, it sanitizes the kitchen floor after dinner without leaving anything behind for small hands to find. It powers through the dried-on messes that a regular mop just smears, and the washable pads peel off and go straight into the laundry with the rest of the day’s towels.

We considered spray mops and a bucket-and-string setup, but the PowerFresh won on both cleanliness and cost over time. No refill bottles of solution to keep buying, no dirty mop water to slosh across the floor, and reusable pads instead of a stream of disposables for a family that already fills the trash fast enough. At around $79.99 it’s a modest price for something we use nightly, and knowing the floor our baby crawls on is cleaned with plain steam is the kind of small reassurance that’s worth a lot.